


The Remainder That Falls To Me

by thenafics



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Under the Red Hood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Photography, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 10:15:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17364113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenafics/pseuds/thenafics
Summary: Tim keeps the parts of Jason that were Robin alive in photographs, in captured memories.





	The Remainder That Falls To Me

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my folder for months, and I figured it was time to post it!

       When Tim starts photographing Jason he thinks nothing of it. Sure, the new Robin is a little different, he hits harder and means it more, but he’s still Robin. There shouldn’t be anything about photographing him that will be much different from the pictures he snuck when Dick was Robin. And yet, there’s something decidedly special about the way the pictures of Jason develop. He seems almost to leap of of the paper and Tim could swear that sometimes he sees Jason’s eyes blink out of the corner of his eye. It starts to be a problem when Tim definitely sees one of the photographs moving. The image of Jason seems to be running through some sort of shadow boxing drill when he should be standing motionless in the center of a dingy rooftop. 

       Tim has always known that a photograph could capture a part of a person, become a momentary glimpse into their soul, but he’s never seen it on this scale. Normally he only gets a flash of movement from a photo of his father taken when he wasn’t paying attention or a subtle smile in the picture of Dick Grayson taken as he swung down on the trapeze. Normally, people hold tight to their souls. Normally, a person’s essence is too contained to leak onto the film and be trapped there by the alchemy of the developing chemicals. Not Jason. Jason practically hemorrhages life force. He’s got something wild in his soul that fills him to bursting and threatens to split him apart at the seams. It flows out freely and floods itself onto the film Tim uses. Little pieces of Jason’s soul get trapped on glossy eight by tens with a frequency that Tim almost finds alarming. If he collects too much of Jason’s soul, will there even be any left for Jason himself? The worry is buried quickly under Tim’s selfish need to possess more and more of someone so vital. So alive. He keeps the best photo in his wallet after developing it onto the smallest piece of paper he can find. Every time he opens it, Jason’s wild grin appears and his smile spreads up all the way to the corner of his sea green eyes. Tim stops feeling guilty very quickly when it’s so obvious that Jason must want someone to belong to, even in part. So Tim keeps on secreting away more and more bits and pieces of Jason. He fills volumes upon volumes with stolen glimpses of a smile and Jason’s burning bright joy. And then… 

       Jason dies and Tim hopes for a long time that maybe he’s captured enough of Jason’s soul that Robin will be able to come back. He piles every single photo he’s ever taken of Jason into a single photo album and tries to remember the feeling of capturing a fragment of a soul in a chemical bath. He manages to distill all of Jason’s essence into a single photograph. It’s a glossy four by five image of Jason in his best light. He’s standing on the edge of Gotham National Bank, leaned up against one of the gargoyles and looking over the streets of Gotham with his wild eyes. When Tim touches the surface of the paper for the first time, it feels like he’s touching a live battery. The trapped fragments of Jason’s soul boils up under his fingertips and curls around his hand like an affectionate cat. The Jason in the photo smiles and waves at Tim. Any attempts to coax Jason out of the photograph fail spectacularly, so Tim just keeps him.

       In the time following after Jason’s death, Tim still follows Batman. He notices as Bruce becomes violent and harsh. Every night, Tim comes back from sneaking around and talks to the photo. Jason always sits and listens to him, a heartbroken look on his face. Sometimes, he paces across the background of the photo. Sometimes, he tries to talk to Tim. Tim can see his mouth moving, but no sound ever escapes the photo. Just around the time that he and Jason start using sign language to have stilted conversations, Batman goes too far. He almost kills a man and Tim decides to intervene. He tells Jason as much and Jason stops responding to him. He sits sullenly somewhere behind the gargoyle and refuses to grace Tim with even the slightest hint of a response. Tim still talks to him every day. Some days after patrol, he’ll stay up until well past dawn just talking. He tells Jason everything and gradually, Jason starts to respond again. He’s still angry at Tim, but is able to convey that it’s more because Tim is in so much danger than because he’s taken Jason’s place. He does laugh when Tim shows him that he has pants to wear instead of those ridiculous booty shorts that Jason had to pour himself into every night. Somewhere along the line, Tim starts calling him Jay.

       The Red Hood appears out of nowhere and makes himself a very large problem within a week. He takes Gotham’s underground by storm almost overnight and has demonstrated with more than a couple heads in bags that he is a force to be reckoned with. The sudden upheaval of the delicate power balance in Gotham plunges all the active Bats knee deep into efforts to re-stabilize the underworld. More than half of the gangs in Gotham fall to the Red Hood in less than three days. By the end of the week, he has almost three quarters of the gangs paying tribute to him and is well on his way to taking total control of illegal arms trades. The most baffling thing about the Red Hood is that he appears to work entirely alone. He’s never seen to have a lieutenant or even a direct underling. He has no gang members to carry out his will, instead choosing to do it all himself. Worst of all, he doesn’t seem to be in it to play games or gain power at all. Anything he can’t immediately seize, he destroys. He doesn’t gamble on negotiation and his word may as well be law. Tim is fascinated by him. He tells Jay about the Red Hood every night and usually just gets a wry smile in return.

       Tim’s fascination with the Red Hood soon turns to photographs, the way all of his most serious obsessions have. He keeps his photos of the Red Hood even more secret than the ones he has taken of the Robins. He had shown them to Bruce as proof, being careful to only show him images that had never contained even a fraction of a soul, greedily keeping all of Jason to himself, for fear that Bruce might take him away. It takes almost a month for Tim to notice that his photographs of the Red Hood are capturing something. He studies them for hours, only catching barely there glints of light and flashes of movement before he finds the one photo that stops his breath. It’s a perfect imitation of the one he has of a young Jason, the same gargoyle and the roof of Gotham National bank framing the figure in the photograph, looking almost posed in his similarity to the other. The Red Hood stands next to the stone gargoyle, his hulking mass casting it in shadow. One hand holds his helmet against his hip, the other holds a cigarette far enough from his unmasked face for him to exhale smoke into the sky. Tim holds his breath as the face in the photograph turns to blow the smoke directly at him, green light flashing in familiar eyes, before he turns away again. It takes Tim a second to remember how to breathe. The face, the eyes, the pose. Everything is familiar in a heart stopping way. That face has the same notched eyebrow and defined lips. Those eyes glint more green now, but the stormy ocean color and the freckles dusted just under them are echoes of ones he is so used to seeing set into a younger face. Tim is torn away from staring at the photograph by a crash from downstairs. Leaving the photo on the bedside table, he rushes down to deal with whatever one of the Titans has knocked over this time. He’ll talk to his Jason before he tells Bruce. Tim knows he’ll need to gather more evidence before then as well.

 

 

He doesn’t end up needing to. There is an intruder in the Tower and the evidence presents itself.


End file.
